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The Logos
Unemployed, lonesome, abandoned by his lover, an obscure artist on the verge of despair begins to question the worth of his craft-until, without warning, he lands the opportunity of a lifetime. Courted by a wealthy patron with enigmatic motives, he yields his talents to corporate interests. In theory, his brief is to sell his soul-to mastermind a publicity campaign for a line of products designed to enhance human perception. In practice, though, he exerts sway over the souls of others. Given freedom to treat the campaign as an artistic endeavour in its own right, he comes to use the public sphere as a forum for shaping aesthetic sensibilities on a scale that others could only dream of. But how far can he extend his ambitions before they break him?
In his bold, uncompromising follow-up to the acclaimed Square Wave, Mark de Silva probes the extremes of human vision. Troubling the relationships between spectatorship and intimacy, beauty and decadence, creativity and exploitation, The Logos challenges the habits with which we look at the world around us-and the ways our selective sight distorts the meaning of our days.
In his bold, uncompromising follow-up to the acclaimed Square Wave, Mark de Silva probes the extremes of human vision. Troubling the relationships between spectatorship and intimacy, beauty and decadence, creativity and exploitation, The Logos challenges the habits with which we look at the world around us-and the ways our selective sight distorts the meaning of our days.
1163 pages, Kindle Edition
First published April 28, 2022
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1056 people want to read
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December 18, 2022
As it often happens, my first introduction to Mark De Silva happened purely by chance. A few months ago, I’ve come across this essay: “Distant Visions: Putdownable Prose and the State of the Art-Novel” by him. It’s immediately pulled me in in spite of being long and I’ve read it at the beginning to the end and re-read it again since. He was very persuasive in that essay and his view of the current state of literature has deeply resonated with me.
Among other matters in the essay, Mark contemplates of two broad types within fiction - “the leisure” novels and the works of art. He defines the latter as the works with “the vision". And here is getting more interesting how he defines “the vision”:
“Vision” calls to mind such a range of things: thought, sense experience, first principles, imagination, discernment, invention, prescience, revelation. It’s this cluster of valences that explains the alchemical effects visionary works, fully appreciated, can have on us. Put simply—and I mean this as a retrieval of a critical ideal, not a novel proposition—such works are capable of reshaping our basic ways of experiencing and conceptualizing the world, ourselves, and the relation between the two. They don’t merely present us with new objects of experience or new information, offering fresh fodder for the mind, but extend and refine our experiential capacities themselves, whatever objects we train them upon.
It is such an illusive and ungrateful game to try to define what constitutes a literary work of art. And, I think this ability “ to extend and refine our experimental capacities themselves” is the one of the best definitions I’ve seen.
I really recommend reading this essay in full. So, being sufficiently impressed, I’ve decided to check what else Mark has written. And it’s appeared that he has just published his second novel. I knew I wanted to read it in spite of it being very hefty volume.
I did read and enjoyed it. But by defining the “visionary” fiction so aptly, Mark has set up quite a bar for me to judge his work against.
The book is a thousand pages first person account of the subjectivity of an artist. The protagonist stays unnamed throughout the novel. The word “artist” is probably the angle of his identity which defines him the most. But of course he is many other things as well: He is a thinker, young man, New Yorker, a relative loner, etc., etc. The novel starts when his girlfriend leaves him. Shortly he is approached by a businessman with the offer to cooperate. And he accepts the offer. Through this project he meets with two very different personalities, a young white actress and a black baseball player. They become the subjects of his art and potential faces of an advertising campaign using the art.
This is more or less all that takes place in this novel in terms of the events. But the plot is not the main focus of this work, at least not until much later in the book. The novel starts very slowly and develops through an accretion of ideas, observations and thoughts of the main protagonist.
My overwhelming impression of reading the first three quarters of this novel was of unhurried perception. Perception is what this artist is mainly doing and, respectively, I ended up doing through his eyes. For the big chunk of the book, its temporarity is slower than the events in real life would be. The protagonist would be contemplating a public notice in a train’s carriage, the quality of a certain art medium or for example the peculiarities of a taste of a certain drink. There are of course flashbacks of events; plenty of ideas and controversial opinions in his head to bite on. But the most interesting dimension for me was this heightened sense of observation of the world around. As an artist, it was not surprising that he has got very acute eye for unusual details.
Also throughout the novel, the protaginist indulged himself in all sorts of visual spectacles from an art house movie to a few baseball games (the one was a video recording which took a few dozens of pages), a boxing match, a modern art exhibition. Respectively, as a readers we would witness all of this through his very unhurried, perceptive gaze. I have to admit that the baseball bit was the hardest for me to focus on. I know a few American writers who have included the game in their “state of the nation” novels. This one is not an exception. But the big chunk of it was waisted on me. Though I think I appreciate the reason it was the part of this novel’s context.
The text might be challenging in terms of its lexicon - I’ve learned quite a few new words and terms. But otherwise, the language is pleasurably fluent, the sentences are well formed, descriptive, pensive, but without flourish or drudgery. I’ve heard in his interview, that the author wanted to write a 19th century novel in terms of style. He has achieved a certain fluency of the language and linearity of the plot. I am not sure the depth of characterisation expected from those novels is fully here. But I personally did not miss it. The main protagonist is certainly a voice and other characters possess sharpness and elusiveness that might compensate for the lack of psychological depth.
Somewhere in the middle of the book, I’ve started to suspect that the narrator would fall into the category of “unlikable narrators”. The term is quite widely used and applied in the reviews. And indeed, I’ve recently come across a review using exactly this term in relation to the protagonist in this book. I personally struggle with the term in general as I find it quite lazy. There are of course the characters who are specifically designed by the author to be “unlikable” - sort of villains in a horror maybe. But in majority of cases, the characters are created by the author to be complex personalities with a nuanced set of views. Nabokov’s protagonists often are branded “unlikable”. But it so much simplifies the matter. Especially I find it confusing when this perceived “unlikability” of the character is the basis of the negative opinion for the whole work.
The narrator of this novel has made me think again about this. Yes, I might not want to chose this narrator with his controversial opinions and often pathetic personality to be my friend. But he is not there for me to like him; and I do not feel compelled to find him “relatable”. He is there to think, to create new art and contemplate his creations. He is there to express a string of his opinions about the people he knows, the city and the country he lives in. As a reader, I might agree, disagree silently argue with him if I wish. But I am a guest in his subjectivity. So I look at the world through that specific prism which I would not normally use. And, coming back to the concept of “visionary” works, it might actually help me to understand better a new point of view behind all this “unlikabilty” of his persona.
I do not know for sure the author’s intention. But my reading of the book was that by creating this personality for his narrator the author has found the way to touch upon the hypocrisy that often hides behind a certain well defined set of values; he would like us to look at the mirror, even if it might be not totally pleasant exercise.
For example, the one of the key questions of the whole novel, in my view: would our world be better if it is more fair and neutral, more impartial? According to the narrator, since the Enlightenment, the prevailing progressive thinking was “that there were more neutral or universal ways of imagining people and things”. But he then asks:
“to whom did we owe this search for neutrality?
The longer I worked with Antral, the less interest I had in any sort of disinterest. More and more, Garrett and I both suspected that, deep in our hearts, most of us didn’t either, even when we knew in some way that impartiality might be more pleasant, more fair, for some people, that a greater number of their choices might be realized through it. Was fairness the prime good toward which all other aims must be bent? Was the fairest world the worthiest? Did getting what you want ipso facto better your life? Were our desires and our wills at all the best guides to our wellbeing? …
Ultimately, it seemed to me that the exact depth of our interest in justice, as well as the value of happiness itself, was thrown into doubt by so much of how we comported ourselves. The world was as unjust and unhappy as it was precisely because we didn’t think such values trumped all else. No, they were just a couple of the many competing aims that guided a meaningful life.”
I guess here by collective “we” he implies his group of progressive friends, artists, intellectuals, generally well educated and well do to left-leaning westerners. I would appropriate this collective identity for a time being as it is quite meaningful in this context. So he comes to the conclusion that we do not spend sufficient efforts to understand why the world the way it is. Moreover, we do not want to map this state of the world to our very individual actions and acknowledge that we, good people, might be partially complicit in this state. Rather, we prefer to feel good by appealing to the abstract general sense of justice somewhere out there. At maximum, we create art, write an article or very occasionally - march outside. So his question is if every single one of us is happy individually to drive our own car and to send our children to private schools to get them better education better start in life why do we expect some fundamental abstract justice to prevail?
I can see a slight breakdown in logic in terms of the equivalence between the neutrality, disinterest and then justice in his analysis. But I certainly see that he has got a point in spite of it. The narrator claims that when he asked his friends a similar question, they become aloof and avoid serious discussion. He calls this problem “secular theodecy” as opposed to the religious theodicy of evil.
Those hard questions are the core of this novel. And the perspective of this guy is often unpleasant but worthwhile thinking about.
There are other interesting questions which he tries to approach a new. For example, what constitutes private vs public art: should a successful piece of art always be so ambiguous that it is impossible to get some common public message out of it? Do we not exaggerate a benefit of the uniqueness of individual interpretation?
“It’s hard to find much agreement in contemporary art, but the value of ambiguity, or mystery, seems more or less universally celebrated. It’s democratic, letting the viewer fill in the gaps, supply his own meanings and make the work his own. How can this not be a good thing, overcoming the tyranny of intersubjective significance?”
Coming back to “unlikability”, however, some more personal attitudes of this guy are plain gross - relationships with women, thoughts about friends and models. But it does not make his character less credible unfortunately. I did not “like” any of the other characters either. But there are quite a few vividly portrayed ones. And this is more entertaining.
Only character I liked in this novel was New York. Yes, it is a very much New York novel. We see a lot of the city and its variety through the narrator’s eyes from Bronx to Long Island and everything in between. Those observations I found properly enjoyable and almost sweet. But be warned that it is another New York novel.
The novel pace and temporarity speeds up quite a bit towards the end. Also the plot is resurfacing and starts to play a significant role in a whole. I personally did not welcome it. I’ve settled into my unhurried contemplation mood and even reconciled myself with an odd baseball game. Also “the resolution” as far as the plot is concerned did not take my breath away either. But there is a plot and it might encourage some other readers to take the plunge of reading a thick volume.
The obvious parallel is with the masterpiece by Gaddis The Recognitions. I thought the author has intended a conversation with that work in terms of the place of commerce in art. I am not sure this conversation was particularly fruitful at the end as the relationship in “The Logos” between the main protagonist and his client seems to be quite pragmatic and might be intentionally unresolved within the novel. While Gaddis targets the higher spheres and Faustian bargains.
From the essay, I gathered the author valued Javier Marías very highly. Reading this novel I thought I felt a strong Marias’s influence in constructing the narrator's personality and in the discursive style the novel cherishes. The same essay is quite critical of Karl Ove Knausgård:
“For anyone with a good university education and an introspective bent, it’s hard to argue there is much that is deeply revelatory in My Struggle‘s ruminations."
I find hard to disagree having read all 6 volumes of it in spite of occasional rare moments of brilliance. However, in spite of this criticism, I felt the influence of Knausgaard on “The Logos” in terms of drinks, cigarettes and other minute occasional mundane details. Though it is nowhere near Knausgaard's level of repetition and it is not a book about the mundane in its substance.
At the end, is it a visionary novel using Mark’s definition? It certainly thrives for it. I think it is almost there, but maybe next his novel would hit that bar more strongly. It gave me a lot of food for thoughts nevertheless and I plan to read his first novel Square Wave which is supposed to be quite different.
Among other matters in the essay, Mark contemplates of two broad types within fiction - “the leisure” novels and the works of art. He defines the latter as the works with “the vision". And here is getting more interesting how he defines “the vision”:
“Vision” calls to mind such a range of things: thought, sense experience, first principles, imagination, discernment, invention, prescience, revelation. It’s this cluster of valences that explains the alchemical effects visionary works, fully appreciated, can have on us. Put simply—and I mean this as a retrieval of a critical ideal, not a novel proposition—such works are capable of reshaping our basic ways of experiencing and conceptualizing the world, ourselves, and the relation between the two. They don’t merely present us with new objects of experience or new information, offering fresh fodder for the mind, but extend and refine our experiential capacities themselves, whatever objects we train them upon.
It is such an illusive and ungrateful game to try to define what constitutes a literary work of art. And, I think this ability “ to extend and refine our experimental capacities themselves” is the one of the best definitions I’ve seen.
I really recommend reading this essay in full. So, being sufficiently impressed, I’ve decided to check what else Mark has written. And it’s appeared that he has just published his second novel. I knew I wanted to read it in spite of it being very hefty volume.
I did read and enjoyed it. But by defining the “visionary” fiction so aptly, Mark has set up quite a bar for me to judge his work against.
The book is a thousand pages first person account of the subjectivity of an artist. The protagonist stays unnamed throughout the novel. The word “artist” is probably the angle of his identity which defines him the most. But of course he is many other things as well: He is a thinker, young man, New Yorker, a relative loner, etc., etc. The novel starts when his girlfriend leaves him. Shortly he is approached by a businessman with the offer to cooperate. And he accepts the offer. Through this project he meets with two very different personalities, a young white actress and a black baseball player. They become the subjects of his art and potential faces of an advertising campaign using the art.
This is more or less all that takes place in this novel in terms of the events. But the plot is not the main focus of this work, at least not until much later in the book. The novel starts very slowly and develops through an accretion of ideas, observations and thoughts of the main protagonist.
My overwhelming impression of reading the first three quarters of this novel was of unhurried perception. Perception is what this artist is mainly doing and, respectively, I ended up doing through his eyes. For the big chunk of the book, its temporarity is slower than the events in real life would be. The protagonist would be contemplating a public notice in a train’s carriage, the quality of a certain art medium or for example the peculiarities of a taste of a certain drink. There are of course flashbacks of events; plenty of ideas and controversial opinions in his head to bite on. But the most interesting dimension for me was this heightened sense of observation of the world around. As an artist, it was not surprising that he has got very acute eye for unusual details.
Also throughout the novel, the protaginist indulged himself in all sorts of visual spectacles from an art house movie to a few baseball games (the one was a video recording which took a few dozens of pages), a boxing match, a modern art exhibition. Respectively, as a readers we would witness all of this through his very unhurried, perceptive gaze. I have to admit that the baseball bit was the hardest for me to focus on. I know a few American writers who have included the game in their “state of the nation” novels. This one is not an exception. But the big chunk of it was waisted on me. Though I think I appreciate the reason it was the part of this novel’s context.
The text might be challenging in terms of its lexicon - I’ve learned quite a few new words and terms. But otherwise, the language is pleasurably fluent, the sentences are well formed, descriptive, pensive, but without flourish or drudgery. I’ve heard in his interview, that the author wanted to write a 19th century novel in terms of style. He has achieved a certain fluency of the language and linearity of the plot. I am not sure the depth of characterisation expected from those novels is fully here. But I personally did not miss it. The main protagonist is certainly a voice and other characters possess sharpness and elusiveness that might compensate for the lack of psychological depth.
Somewhere in the middle of the book, I’ve started to suspect that the narrator would fall into the category of “unlikable narrators”. The term is quite widely used and applied in the reviews. And indeed, I’ve recently come across a review using exactly this term in relation to the protagonist in this book. I personally struggle with the term in general as I find it quite lazy. There are of course the characters who are specifically designed by the author to be “unlikable” - sort of villains in a horror maybe. But in majority of cases, the characters are created by the author to be complex personalities with a nuanced set of views. Nabokov’s protagonists often are branded “unlikable”. But it so much simplifies the matter. Especially I find it confusing when this perceived “unlikability” of the character is the basis of the negative opinion for the whole work.
The narrator of this novel has made me think again about this. Yes, I might not want to chose this narrator with his controversial opinions and often pathetic personality to be my friend. But he is not there for me to like him; and I do not feel compelled to find him “relatable”. He is there to think, to create new art and contemplate his creations. He is there to express a string of his opinions about the people he knows, the city and the country he lives in. As a reader, I might agree, disagree silently argue with him if I wish. But I am a guest in his subjectivity. So I look at the world through that specific prism which I would not normally use. And, coming back to the concept of “visionary” works, it might actually help me to understand better a new point of view behind all this “unlikabilty” of his persona.
I do not know for sure the author’s intention. But my reading of the book was that by creating this personality for his narrator the author has found the way to touch upon the hypocrisy that often hides behind a certain well defined set of values; he would like us to look at the mirror, even if it might be not totally pleasant exercise.
For example, the one of the key questions of the whole novel, in my view: would our world be better if it is more fair and neutral, more impartial? According to the narrator, since the Enlightenment, the prevailing progressive thinking was “that there were more neutral or universal ways of imagining people and things”. But he then asks:
“to whom did we owe this search for neutrality?
The longer I worked with Antral, the less interest I had in any sort of disinterest. More and more, Garrett and I both suspected that, deep in our hearts, most of us didn’t either, even when we knew in some way that impartiality might be more pleasant, more fair, for some people, that a greater number of their choices might be realized through it. Was fairness the prime good toward which all other aims must be bent? Was the fairest world the worthiest? Did getting what you want ipso facto better your life? Were our desires and our wills at all the best guides to our wellbeing? …
Ultimately, it seemed to me that the exact depth of our interest in justice, as well as the value of happiness itself, was thrown into doubt by so much of how we comported ourselves. The world was as unjust and unhappy as it was precisely because we didn’t think such values trumped all else. No, they were just a couple of the many competing aims that guided a meaningful life.”
I guess here by collective “we” he implies his group of progressive friends, artists, intellectuals, generally well educated and well do to left-leaning westerners. I would appropriate this collective identity for a time being as it is quite meaningful in this context. So he comes to the conclusion that we do not spend sufficient efforts to understand why the world the way it is. Moreover, we do not want to map this state of the world to our very individual actions and acknowledge that we, good people, might be partially complicit in this state. Rather, we prefer to feel good by appealing to the abstract general sense of justice somewhere out there. At maximum, we create art, write an article or very occasionally - march outside. So his question is if every single one of us is happy individually to drive our own car and to send our children to private schools to get them better education better start in life why do we expect some fundamental abstract justice to prevail?
I can see a slight breakdown in logic in terms of the equivalence between the neutrality, disinterest and then justice in his analysis. But I certainly see that he has got a point in spite of it. The narrator claims that when he asked his friends a similar question, they become aloof and avoid serious discussion. He calls this problem “secular theodecy” as opposed to the religious theodicy of evil.
Those hard questions are the core of this novel. And the perspective of this guy is often unpleasant but worthwhile thinking about.
There are other interesting questions which he tries to approach a new. For example, what constitutes private vs public art: should a successful piece of art always be so ambiguous that it is impossible to get some common public message out of it? Do we not exaggerate a benefit of the uniqueness of individual interpretation?
“It’s hard to find much agreement in contemporary art, but the value of ambiguity, or mystery, seems more or less universally celebrated. It’s democratic, letting the viewer fill in the gaps, supply his own meanings and make the work his own. How can this not be a good thing, overcoming the tyranny of intersubjective significance?”
Coming back to “unlikability”, however, some more personal attitudes of this guy are plain gross - relationships with women, thoughts about friends and models. But it does not make his character less credible unfortunately. I did not “like” any of the other characters either. But there are quite a few vividly portrayed ones. And this is more entertaining.
Only character I liked in this novel was New York. Yes, it is a very much New York novel. We see a lot of the city and its variety through the narrator’s eyes from Bronx to Long Island and everything in between. Those observations I found properly enjoyable and almost sweet. But be warned that it is another New York novel.
The novel pace and temporarity speeds up quite a bit towards the end. Also the plot is resurfacing and starts to play a significant role in a whole. I personally did not welcome it. I’ve settled into my unhurried contemplation mood and even reconciled myself with an odd baseball game. Also “the resolution” as far as the plot is concerned did not take my breath away either. But there is a plot and it might encourage some other readers to take the plunge of reading a thick volume.
The obvious parallel is with the masterpiece by Gaddis The Recognitions. I thought the author has intended a conversation with that work in terms of the place of commerce in art. I am not sure this conversation was particularly fruitful at the end as the relationship in “The Logos” between the main protagonist and his client seems to be quite pragmatic and might be intentionally unresolved within the novel. While Gaddis targets the higher spheres and Faustian bargains.
From the essay, I gathered the author valued Javier Marías very highly. Reading this novel I thought I felt a strong Marias’s influence in constructing the narrator's personality and in the discursive style the novel cherishes. The same essay is quite critical of Karl Ove Knausgård:
“For anyone with a good university education and an introspective bent, it’s hard to argue there is much that is deeply revelatory in My Struggle‘s ruminations."
I find hard to disagree having read all 6 volumes of it in spite of occasional rare moments of brilliance. However, in spite of this criticism, I felt the influence of Knausgaard on “The Logos” in terms of drinks, cigarettes and other minute occasional mundane details. Though it is nowhere near Knausgaard's level of repetition and it is not a book about the mundane in its substance.
At the end, is it a visionary novel using Mark’s definition? It certainly thrives for it. I think it is almost there, but maybe next his novel would hit that bar more strongly. It gave me a lot of food for thoughts nevertheless and I plan to read his first novel Square Wave which is supposed to be quite different.
June 2, 2022
Ok, here it goes trying to write a little something about this work of art. I’ll start by saying that this should be read by anyone and everyone who loves what a novel can do. The Logos is over a 1,000 pages. Yes, a 1 and 3 zeros and in absolutely no way does it feel long or overwritten or overwhelming. I honestly could have enjoyed another 200 pages. This first person account is one of the better hyper reality (great description Seth) novels I’ve read in a long time. And Mark de Silva is as comfortable writing about art as he is sports as he is philosophy as he is music…I can keep going if you want.
You can’t help but feel for each and every character and how they are being used. From Duke and Daphne to Karen, Rick and John. Mark de Silva gives every character their due and everyone is written eloquently and I thought creatively. I was a huge fan of his first novel, Square Wave and while this is different in tone (present time, fewer characters etc…) this is an incredible book. And it’s also an OUTSTANDING New York novel. I can picture every setting vividly. Now let’s get this into as many hands as possible.
You can’t help but feel for each and every character and how they are being used. From Duke and Daphne to Karen, Rick and John. Mark de Silva gives every character their due and everyone is written eloquently and I thought creatively. I was a huge fan of his first novel, Square Wave and while this is different in tone (present time, fewer characters etc…) this is an incredible book. And it’s also an OUTSTANDING New York novel. I can picture every setting vividly. Now let’s get this into as many hands as possible.
January 5, 2023
I come out of reading Mark de Silva’s big beefy tome, The Logos, with a lot of mixed feelings. Mixed but still positive overall. In fact, before I dive into the book, Matthew Taylor Blais’s review in The Collidescope captures the overall sentiment of completing this one succinctly, and accurately: “It was often the book I’d hoped it to be, but I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to being underwhelmed in the final calculation.”
In fact, there’s not a lot I can add here that Blais doesn’t cover in depth in his lengthy take on this book, however, for posterity, I’m going to record some of my impressions and thoughts.
Firstly, de Silva’s prose and style in this novel has some intoxicating and mesmerizing quality to it, where, once begun, you fall into a hole, losing time as you pound though. Slightly atypical for a maximalist novel, The Logos is told in a very limited, close first person from an unnamed narrator. The first-person POV really hems in de Silva, sometimes to the benefit of the novel, sometimes to its detriment. This style was somewhat reminiscent to me of Proust’s Marcel in In Search of Lost Time, especially as de Silva’s novel feels like a social novel as the narrator meets and engages with up-and-comers in the professional sports and Hollywood arenas. It is also a dedicatedly realist novel, grounded in a kind of sobering meticulousness of everyday cognition—being so close in the narrator’s head, every glancing thought and impression is applied to the minutia of his observations, and as a visual artist, he is fundamentally an observer and auditor of the world surrounding him. While not an aesthetic breakthrough or revelation, de Silva uses this close first-person to kind of create a fissure within the reader—inherently the “I” of first-person becomes the “I” of the reader who is identifying themselves in the novel, however, as the narrator comes to express some extremely discomforting ideas and opinions, we don’t know how to inch or look away. Instead, we try to internalize and examine ourselves in reflection of the “I” on the page vs. the “I” inside your body.
In the novel, the unnamed narrator, hard on his luck romantically (and consequently financially), is passed off by a rich patron to a yet richer benefactor—Garrett, an aloof, esoteric CEO of a storage company who is look to launch a line of consumer goods with vague performance-enhancing and nootropic capabilities. Garrett is seeking an artist to help develop a visually idiosyncratic guerilla marketing campaign ahead of the launch of these products, which include a special kind of lens to enhance visual performance, Theria, an elusive sports beverage with almost amphetamine-like qualities, and a wheat-whiskey, also with vague and intangible properties. To develop the campaign, Garrett gives the narrator—working through his friends’ art collective and creative agency Cosquer—access to two people who will be the faces of the guerilla campaign: Duke, a volatile yet explosively impressive wide receiver for the Chicago Bears, and Daphne, an actress of esoteric underground art film looking for her big break. The entanglements that follow as the narrator becomes intimately involved with both of these characters comes to inform the ways in which he captures their image in his illustrations for the marketing campaign.
The novel works through a lot of philosophic moods through its first half, including, but not limited to, art as a commercial product, the role of art in museums (and in social experience), gentrification and its beneficiaries, and more. In some ways, it’s reminiscent of The Recognitions for it’s kind of Faustian conceit: an artist hard up for cash sells out his artistic talents. However, de Silva’s protagonist is given free artistic license in his deal with the Devil, where he’s then free to explore more pressing and present ideas about how commerce has co-opted art, and how art’s inherent value now comes from its extrinsic ability to enhance or drive capital. That is, provocative art has value if it results in commercial sales.
As the novel tangles with some of these deeper ideas of art and the artist, it does feel a bit like the book is kind of for lack of some real heft and depth that others of its ilk boast. As I’ve named here, both Gaddis and Proust have much deeper things going on in their works, things that deliver profound reads on our humanity. Unfortunately, de Silva’s novel sort of just points to the problems and shows them as analogy, while the analytical subtext often isn’t very much more nuanced than pointing a finger and saying “see,” and that’s if the subtext is present at all in certain moments that leave you scratching your head.
One example of this is the narrator’s refrain about the vacant apartment below him. The narrator lives in a “rough” part of The Bronx, as a kind of tourist and outsider living within. He also played a hand in the family below him being evicted for mere fact that he and his then-girlfriend, Claire, want the space as an art studio. The narrator never comes to use the space, and it lays vacant for the entirety of the novel, while he never ponders his role in harming the family who likely has struggled and suffered immensely by his actions. This gets to a deeper core about race in the novel, where the narrator seems to express some level of racist thinking that goes unexamined, or at least, unchallenged in the work by the narrator himself, or by those around him. There is one case where his racism is checked by his colleagues, but its ultimately waved off, and forgotten.
The book, ultimately, seems to have a lot of the right pieces for something truly spectacular, but it kind of squanders deeper questions about racism, art, the observing gaze of the public, women’s bodies, addiction, commerce, and commercialization, and more. It features myriad things that point to these contemporary issues without offering a lot of weight to them—emotional resonance, moral confusion, rigorous self-examination, etc. This stems, I think, from a kind of lack of central conflict in the novel—there is no hero’s journey or any kind of grail quest to speak of. The artist is just doing this for money, and he is instantly granted the money, and he is always successful in his endeavors. There are no stakes for the narrator, and he gets everything he wants, unchallenged. This isn’t to say the book needs plot but using formal structures to deploy a story are needed—it’s hallmark to some of the most masterful works of fiction in our public body of literature.
Despite its problems, the book still has this magic to it. A level of intrigue that does carry you through it, and even demands attention. You are always wondering where the book will go next, while delighted with the meticulousness, metered and decorative prose. Readers who love “big books” will find a lot to really love and admire in The Logos. And you will find yourself lost within it. However, you may also find yourself wanting for more than what’s there, and that’s the ultimate disappointment, that a book so close to greatness can fall so short.
In fact, there’s not a lot I can add here that Blais doesn’t cover in depth in his lengthy take on this book, however, for posterity, I’m going to record some of my impressions and thoughts.
Firstly, de Silva’s prose and style in this novel has some intoxicating and mesmerizing quality to it, where, once begun, you fall into a hole, losing time as you pound though. Slightly atypical for a maximalist novel, The Logos is told in a very limited, close first person from an unnamed narrator. The first-person POV really hems in de Silva, sometimes to the benefit of the novel, sometimes to its detriment. This style was somewhat reminiscent to me of Proust’s Marcel in In Search of Lost Time, especially as de Silva’s novel feels like a social novel as the narrator meets and engages with up-and-comers in the professional sports and Hollywood arenas. It is also a dedicatedly realist novel, grounded in a kind of sobering meticulousness of everyday cognition—being so close in the narrator’s head, every glancing thought and impression is applied to the minutia of his observations, and as a visual artist, he is fundamentally an observer and auditor of the world surrounding him. While not an aesthetic breakthrough or revelation, de Silva uses this close first-person to kind of create a fissure within the reader—inherently the “I” of first-person becomes the “I” of the reader who is identifying themselves in the novel, however, as the narrator comes to express some extremely discomforting ideas and opinions, we don’t know how to inch or look away. Instead, we try to internalize and examine ourselves in reflection of the “I” on the page vs. the “I” inside your body.
In the novel, the unnamed narrator, hard on his luck romantically (and consequently financially), is passed off by a rich patron to a yet richer benefactor—Garrett, an aloof, esoteric CEO of a storage company who is look to launch a line of consumer goods with vague performance-enhancing and nootropic capabilities. Garrett is seeking an artist to help develop a visually idiosyncratic guerilla marketing campaign ahead of the launch of these products, which include a special kind of lens to enhance visual performance, Theria, an elusive sports beverage with almost amphetamine-like qualities, and a wheat-whiskey, also with vague and intangible properties. To develop the campaign, Garrett gives the narrator—working through his friends’ art collective and creative agency Cosquer—access to two people who will be the faces of the guerilla campaign: Duke, a volatile yet explosively impressive wide receiver for the Chicago Bears, and Daphne, an actress of esoteric underground art film looking for her big break. The entanglements that follow as the narrator becomes intimately involved with both of these characters comes to inform the ways in which he captures their image in his illustrations for the marketing campaign.
The novel works through a lot of philosophic moods through its first half, including, but not limited to, art as a commercial product, the role of art in museums (and in social experience), gentrification and its beneficiaries, and more. In some ways, it’s reminiscent of The Recognitions for it’s kind of Faustian conceit: an artist hard up for cash sells out his artistic talents. However, de Silva’s protagonist is given free artistic license in his deal with the Devil, where he’s then free to explore more pressing and present ideas about how commerce has co-opted art, and how art’s inherent value now comes from its extrinsic ability to enhance or drive capital. That is, provocative art has value if it results in commercial sales.
As the novel tangles with some of these deeper ideas of art and the artist, it does feel a bit like the book is kind of for lack of some real heft and depth that others of its ilk boast. As I’ve named here, both Gaddis and Proust have much deeper things going on in their works, things that deliver profound reads on our humanity. Unfortunately, de Silva’s novel sort of just points to the problems and shows them as analogy, while the analytical subtext often isn’t very much more nuanced than pointing a finger and saying “see,” and that’s if the subtext is present at all in certain moments that leave you scratching your head.
One example of this is the narrator’s refrain about the vacant apartment below him. The narrator lives in a “rough” part of The Bronx, as a kind of tourist and outsider living within. He also played a hand in the family below him being evicted for mere fact that he and his then-girlfriend, Claire, want the space as an art studio. The narrator never comes to use the space, and it lays vacant for the entirety of the novel, while he never ponders his role in harming the family who likely has struggled and suffered immensely by his actions. This gets to a deeper core about race in the novel, where the narrator seems to express some level of racist thinking that goes unexamined, or at least, unchallenged in the work by the narrator himself, or by those around him. There is one case where his racism is checked by his colleagues, but its ultimately waved off, and forgotten.
The book, ultimately, seems to have a lot of the right pieces for something truly spectacular, but it kind of squanders deeper questions about racism, art, the observing gaze of the public, women’s bodies, addiction, commerce, and commercialization, and more. It features myriad things that point to these contemporary issues without offering a lot of weight to them—emotional resonance, moral confusion, rigorous self-examination, etc. This stems, I think, from a kind of lack of central conflict in the novel—there is no hero’s journey or any kind of grail quest to speak of. The artist is just doing this for money, and he is instantly granted the money, and he is always successful in his endeavors. There are no stakes for the narrator, and he gets everything he wants, unchallenged. This isn’t to say the book needs plot but using formal structures to deploy a story are needed—it’s hallmark to some of the most masterful works of fiction in our public body of literature.
Despite its problems, the book still has this magic to it. A level of intrigue that does carry you through it, and even demands attention. You are always wondering where the book will go next, while delighted with the meticulousness, metered and decorative prose. Readers who love “big books” will find a lot to really love and admire in The Logos. And you will find yourself lost within it. However, you may also find yourself wanting for more than what’s there, and that’s the ultimate disappointment, that a book so close to greatness can fall so short.
September 30, 2022
I went very long grappling with this good book for The Collidescope: https://thecollidescope.com/2022/09/2...
July 6, 2022
The Logos is a dazzling epistemological meditation on modernity, perception, representation and performance that not only reimagines, but rekindles a curiosity regarding the ongoing investigation of the philosophy of the American experience, which finds Mark De Silva trailblazing new and powerful ideas of what the great American novel can achieve.
~Phillip Freedenberg
Author of America and the Cult of the Cactus Boots: A Diagnostic
Guam
July 2022
~Phillip Freedenberg
Author of America and the Cult of the Cactus Boots: A Diagnostic
Guam
July 2022
July 5, 2025
A novel that feels pretentious in many ways. The characters embody a kind of self importance and awareness that coupled with moving in rich art circles in New York makes them pretty unlikable. But the writing is really good. It flows well and draws you in with its intelligence and pacing. Almost hypnotic (as another reviewer was saying) and I enjoyed reading this big brick.
June 26, 2023
i really just wanted him to develop ANY of the big ideas in this book…we don’t need 700 pages of pretentious rambling by an unlikeable narrator we need exploration of ideas!! there are some interesting issues to grapple with here and none of them are thought through enough! like how other races can depict/discuss Black people and their lives in a genuine way, the parasitization of companies feeding off of artists/designers for unethical purposes, the quagmire of working for a company that seems good on the surface but invests in/participates in evil actions on the side, etc. he also could have tried a BIT harder about dealing with women, other races/ethnic groups, poor people, etc. like there are pretty simple ways to reduce prejudiced language/phrasing in your writing even with an unlikeable narrator with some discriminatory views !!!
i wish this book did more with its premise :( there is more here! i promise!! maybe the editors just got bored of all of the pretentious art talk or the fifth football game or ninth performance art scene…
i wish this book did more with its premise :( there is more here! i promise!! maybe the editors just got bored of all of the pretentious art talk or the fifth football game or ninth performance art scene…
Read
October 14, 2022What a behemoth, but a hyper-focused one nonetheless, even if it does drag at some points.
If you're seeking a 'novel of ideas' that doesn't shirk away from the admirable task of taking the world as it is, and confronting you with it, instead of sketching out how it ought to be, then give this a shot. Don't expect too much high weirdness, it's got more in common with 19th century tomes of psychological realism than any post-modern pastiches or satires.
If you're seeking a 'novel of ideas' that doesn't shirk away from the admirable task of taking the world as it is, and confronting you with it, instead of sketching out how it ought to be, then give this a shot. Don't expect too much high weirdness, it's got more in common with 19th century tomes of psychological realism than any post-modern pastiches or satires.
June 14, 2022
Stylistically, I approximate it as sort of a mashup between the meandering and contemplative works of modernism (Musil etc.) and some of the postmodern works that are highly critical of the commercialized arts and literary scene (Ellis, Gaddis etc.) A challenging, unique, and highly enjoyable piece of work from de Silva.
June 7, 2022
Mark de Silva's The Logos stands with some of the best novels of the century: The Known World, Middle C, and A Naked Singularity. It's a dark mountain with vertiginous switchbacks--it quests to ask why we "love" those who use us, those who feast on our souls.
February 19, 2025
Every time I come back to this book, I am astonished. A criminally under-read novel.
Read
January 15, 2024What one would do, even under circumstances that never arise, says something about who one is, or supposes oneself to be.
October 31, 2023
The Logos is a Faustian tale about an artist—the unnamed narrator—midway through life’s gloomy wood whose girlfriend of two and a half years, Claire, leaves him shortly after he decides to quit the world of gallery shows and the rigamarole that accompanies it. But he has bills to pay and has sold the last of his pictures (of Claire) to an avid (and wealthy) collector, so is at sea with what to do next. In this rich and learned novel of ideas, the narrator is well-read and (in many ways) self-educated (beyond the minimum requirements of his otherwise solid undergraduate years), whose opinions—on art, communications, sensory experience, film, sports, and more—are richly detailed, nuanced, and well-reasoned. Almost every paragraph of this novel is a mini-essay on whatever topic comes to his mind, articulate and graceful.
The narrator and his circle of friends come from money, going back three generations for the nouveau-est of the riche and eight generations for those who satisfy the American version of old money. They have been steeped in high culture all their lives, take it seriously, and have used the advantages of their families’ wealth to further cultivate and explore their interests. One faction of his peers have been publishing a high-end arts journal, Cosquer (significant production values, no advertising), for which the narrator has served in an editorial capacity as well as contributing pictures of his own for publication, but has been steadily withdrawing from along with everything else. Cosquer has suffered financial problems and has begun considering what had once been unthinkable: Accepting advertising.
Enter James Garrett, owner of several companies involved in materials science and engineering, also from wealth and himself presumably worth billions, although a dollar amount is never given. He has several products in development for which he would like to develop a stealth ad campaign for: a whiskey, a sports drink (along the lines of Gatorade but with a kick), and sunglasses. Turns out he’s a fan of the narrator’s work, finds it rich in emotional and philosophical implications, and would like the narrator to develop a series of images that would suggest qualities associated with the products and two unknown people up-and-coming in the worlds of sport and theater. Karen, the head of Cosquer and a friend of the narrator’s from college, will provide the copy. Will the narrator, the pure artist, succumb to working in the realm of crass commercialism—although of the refined sort for the well-heeled (the Cosquer set), where art and commerce often intermingle, comment upon, and influence each other, though for different ends?
Well, not in that way, no. The narrator will not agree to typography appearing on or seeming to comment upon the pictures he creates. Garrett agrees, and the narrator is given carte blanche to buy whatever materials he needs, spend whatever is needed to meet and get to know the two human principles—Duke, the football player, and Daphne, the actor—and so forth, while Cosquer will receive generous funding to keep it afloat. The narrator soon sets to work:
"In a single weekend I’d gathered proof of the adequacy of materials: Daphne and Duke. Which meant that when this bleariness abated [the hangover from his time with Duke], there’d be real work to be done, not mere trial runs, or just final pieces to previous puzzles, like those morose portraits of Claire that had come to dominate my life. It had been a year at least since I’d last worked with this excitement of possibility, of opening rather than closing vistas. Along with this would be the first serious money in a while, quite possibly more of it than I’d yet experienced or had any right to expect had I carried on with Sandy and his vaunted gallery. With philanthropists like Garrett, you really couldn’t know just how lucky you were going to be."
Indeed.
And about three-quarters through the book, the narrator realizes that, in his deal with Garrett, he has traded his freedom for joys.
The drinks, especially Theria the sports drink, alter the narrator’s perceptions, as do the sunglasses. Already hyper-articulate and keenly insightful about how art conveys to viewers its effects and understanding of the subject, and already possessed of better than 20-20 vision, these performance-enhancing materials further heighten his awareness and sensory stimulation. Theria itself seems to induce withdrawal effects, and the narrator is reluctant to drink more when Garrett tells him that the formula for it hasn’t yet received FDA approval. Additional joys come in the form of the emotionally and physically fraught relationships he develops with Daphne and Duke. Furthermore, it turns out that Garrett’s other companies, those responsible for most of his wealth beyond that inherited from his parents, are devoted to toxic waste and crowd-control munitions.
By the novel’s end, many of these issues have been worked out but those that remain seem to contradict the direction indicated by the narrative: Although the narrator is inclined to take seriously Garrett’s underlying notions of godliness and doing right, neither Garrett nor the narrator question the fact that Garrett’s “solutions” to the problems of toxic waste and riot control are to capitalize on them rather than address the systemic conditions that give rise to them. And for all the narrator’s focus on his choice of materials for his pictures—graphite, pastels, paper characteristics and qualities—those considerations don’t arise once his pictures start to appear on the sides of cabs, on billboards, and on skyscrapers, as if his underlying notions of successful artistic expression reduced to ubiquity and scale.
These issues aside, The Logos is one of the finest novels I’ve read in the past couple of years, along the lines of Jim Gauer’s Novel Explosives in its willingness—its insistence—on exploring motivations and choices regarding significant ethical issues. And while I was surprised at and disappointed by the end of The Logos, at least Mark de Silva—like Dostoevsky and Philip Roth—has given us characters worth arguing with.
For more of my reviews, please see https://www.thebookbeat.com/backroom/...
The narrator and his circle of friends come from money, going back three generations for the nouveau-est of the riche and eight generations for those who satisfy the American version of old money. They have been steeped in high culture all their lives, take it seriously, and have used the advantages of their families’ wealth to further cultivate and explore their interests. One faction of his peers have been publishing a high-end arts journal, Cosquer (significant production values, no advertising), for which the narrator has served in an editorial capacity as well as contributing pictures of his own for publication, but has been steadily withdrawing from along with everything else. Cosquer has suffered financial problems and has begun considering what had once been unthinkable: Accepting advertising.
Enter James Garrett, owner of several companies involved in materials science and engineering, also from wealth and himself presumably worth billions, although a dollar amount is never given. He has several products in development for which he would like to develop a stealth ad campaign for: a whiskey, a sports drink (along the lines of Gatorade but with a kick), and sunglasses. Turns out he’s a fan of the narrator’s work, finds it rich in emotional and philosophical implications, and would like the narrator to develop a series of images that would suggest qualities associated with the products and two unknown people up-and-coming in the worlds of sport and theater. Karen, the head of Cosquer and a friend of the narrator’s from college, will provide the copy. Will the narrator, the pure artist, succumb to working in the realm of crass commercialism—although of the refined sort for the well-heeled (the Cosquer set), where art and commerce often intermingle, comment upon, and influence each other, though for different ends?
Well, not in that way, no. The narrator will not agree to typography appearing on or seeming to comment upon the pictures he creates. Garrett agrees, and the narrator is given carte blanche to buy whatever materials he needs, spend whatever is needed to meet and get to know the two human principles—Duke, the football player, and Daphne, the actor—and so forth, while Cosquer will receive generous funding to keep it afloat. The narrator soon sets to work:
"In a single weekend I’d gathered proof of the adequacy of materials: Daphne and Duke. Which meant that when this bleariness abated [the hangover from his time with Duke], there’d be real work to be done, not mere trial runs, or just final pieces to previous puzzles, like those morose portraits of Claire that had come to dominate my life. It had been a year at least since I’d last worked with this excitement of possibility, of opening rather than closing vistas. Along with this would be the first serious money in a while, quite possibly more of it than I’d yet experienced or had any right to expect had I carried on with Sandy and his vaunted gallery. With philanthropists like Garrett, you really couldn’t know just how lucky you were going to be."
Indeed.
And about three-quarters through the book, the narrator realizes that, in his deal with Garrett, he has traded his freedom for joys.
The drinks, especially Theria the sports drink, alter the narrator’s perceptions, as do the sunglasses. Already hyper-articulate and keenly insightful about how art conveys to viewers its effects and understanding of the subject, and already possessed of better than 20-20 vision, these performance-enhancing materials further heighten his awareness and sensory stimulation. Theria itself seems to induce withdrawal effects, and the narrator is reluctant to drink more when Garrett tells him that the formula for it hasn’t yet received FDA approval. Additional joys come in the form of the emotionally and physically fraught relationships he develops with Daphne and Duke. Furthermore, it turns out that Garrett’s other companies, those responsible for most of his wealth beyond that inherited from his parents, are devoted to toxic waste and crowd-control munitions.
By the novel’s end, many of these issues have been worked out but those that remain seem to contradict the direction indicated by the narrative: Although the narrator is inclined to take seriously Garrett’s underlying notions of godliness and doing right, neither Garrett nor the narrator question the fact that Garrett’s “solutions” to the problems of toxic waste and riot control are to capitalize on them rather than address the systemic conditions that give rise to them. And for all the narrator’s focus on his choice of materials for his pictures—graphite, pastels, paper characteristics and qualities—those considerations don’t arise once his pictures start to appear on the sides of cabs, on billboards, and on skyscrapers, as if his underlying notions of successful artistic expression reduced to ubiquity and scale.
These issues aside, The Logos is one of the finest novels I’ve read in the past couple of years, along the lines of Jim Gauer’s Novel Explosives in its willingness—its insistence—on exploring motivations and choices regarding significant ethical issues. And while I was surprised at and disappointed by the end of The Logos, at least Mark de Silva—like Dostoevsky and Philip Roth—has given us characters worth arguing with.
For more of my reviews, please see https://www.thebookbeat.com/backroom/...
October 11, 2022
Awful
Mark, you need an editor. I am using as few words as possible to show you that someone can convey a message without vomiting every thought they have ever had on to the page, most meant to show your intelligence or knowledge. This book is 850 pages too long.
Mark, you need an editor. I am using as few words as possible to show you that someone can convey a message without vomiting every thought they have ever had on to the page, most meant to show your intelligence or knowledge. This book is 850 pages too long.
September 12, 2024
DNF at page 87.
Mark de Silva is clearly part of the new literary cool kids club along with Joshua Cohen, Louis Armand, Sergio de la Pava, and others. Part of a trend of maximalist novels by male authors published primarily through print on demand micro presses. The question remains to be seen whether these works are truly capable of standing shoulder to shoulder with the literary greats of yester-year like Pynchon, DeLillo, Gaddis, etc. I do think de Silva will one day be capable of writing a great novel, and there are certainly flashes of brilliance and acute intelligence in The Logos. However, it is concerning for an author to have such a lack of awareness in self-editing. This book is massive, clocking in at 1034 pages for the UK edition. That is Against the Day massive, but not Against the Day impressive. Now, I have no issue with large novels, but the question for me is, does the book warrant that length? If a 1000 page novel written in the first person is already not a red flag, there is just so much extraneous material in The Logos both stylistically and narratively. And while de Silva clearly shows promise, there are also some serious blind spots in his writing craft. Editing this book down would have only solved so much. I think pared down to 500 pages de Silva's wax wings probably still would have melted, for me. But putting this book down at 87/1034 feels like we never even got off the ground. Like others on Goodreads, highly recommend Matthew Blais' review on The Collidescope. And to be clear, I am very happy for authors like de Silva to be putting out work and for that work to be finding an audience. But there are so many books on my to read list, if an author is going to ask for a 1000+ page commitment then it can't be one sided, it has to be a reciprocal relationship. I certainly haven't sworn de Silva off but I'll be viewing from a distance. And please god, let him condense his formidable powers into a svelte format for his next outing.
Mark de Silva is clearly part of the new literary cool kids club along with Joshua Cohen, Louis Armand, Sergio de la Pava, and others. Part of a trend of maximalist novels by male authors published primarily through print on demand micro presses. The question remains to be seen whether these works are truly capable of standing shoulder to shoulder with the literary greats of yester-year like Pynchon, DeLillo, Gaddis, etc. I do think de Silva will one day be capable of writing a great novel, and there are certainly flashes of brilliance and acute intelligence in The Logos. However, it is concerning for an author to have such a lack of awareness in self-editing. This book is massive, clocking in at 1034 pages for the UK edition. That is Against the Day massive, but not Against the Day impressive. Now, I have no issue with large novels, but the question for me is, does the book warrant that length? If a 1000 page novel written in the first person is already not a red flag, there is just so much extraneous material in The Logos both stylistically and narratively. And while de Silva clearly shows promise, there are also some serious blind spots in his writing craft. Editing this book down would have only solved so much. I think pared down to 500 pages de Silva's wax wings probably still would have melted, for me. But putting this book down at 87/1034 feels like we never even got off the ground. Like others on Goodreads, highly recommend Matthew Blais' review on The Collidescope. And to be clear, I am very happy for authors like de Silva to be putting out work and for that work to be finding an audience. But there are so many books on my to read list, if an author is going to ask for a 1000+ page commitment then it can't be one sided, it has to be a reciprocal relationship. I certainly haven't sworn de Silva off but I'll be viewing from a distance. And please god, let him condense his formidable powers into a svelte format for his next outing.
November 14, 2024
Bro this book is like uploading an entire consciousness into your brain, like to read it is to alter your perception; and it forces a certain pace, demands a certain patience, while filling you up with many beautiful thoughts about art and how it interfaces with our world. And not for nothing, but to write one of these brick bangers from first person without that perspective becoming tired is, wow, very difficult, like, I acknowledge the degree of difficulty.
But
at the same time
it leaves you wanting a bit more. Something perhaps a bit more decisive. Incisive. Definitive.
It almost gets there.
But
at the same time
it leaves you wanting a bit more. Something perhaps a bit more decisive. Incisive. Definitive.
It almost gets there.
April 3, 2023
A serious achievement. Mark mentioned in a q&a with Greg Gerke that he followed his fascination with this “unlikeable narrator” to see where his own sensibilities uncomfortably aligned, where the frisson of a nasty but believable personality would spark most tellingly. This long, intricate, thoughtful novel contains some of the best writing on art, perception, creative group dynamics, advertising, and sport that I’ve ever encountered.
March 16, 2025
I really enjoyed The Logos. It was a page turner - Mark has a great style - I enjoyed every styled sentence. The book flew by for me - whilst set in NY - I found it to quite pan America (be it characters backgrounds or travel)- and contemporarily spot on. Events described in the book have played out but just 2-3 years later.
I give The Logis the highest recommendation.
I give The Logis the highest recommendation.
March 3, 2025
This dude goes hard in the paint on Twitter
July 14, 2025
Sublime.
Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews